[TO THE EDITOR OP TIDE "SPECTATOR. " ] SIR, —In Mr. Rider Haggard's
interesting but singularly in- conclusive letter he does not mention how far the railway bridge over which the dog was thrown is from the bed where he lay in his nightmare. Was it so far that a dying yell could not reach his ear "between the time that I heard a voice and the time that my consciousness answered to it" That might at once set up a dream.
But it need not have been a dying yell. It may have come from the beast at some point of his career between the bedroom window and the bridge where he was probably murdered. For Mr. Haggard seems to have been a great deal too easy in exchanging for another his first view, that the dog died (as reported by the " vet.") because " his skull was smashed almost to a pulp by some heavy blunt instrument." On Monday morning the railway people all knew that the dog had been killed and pitched into the water; and one of them had even retained his collar (with or without Mr. Haggard's name on it). Yet no one said a word about the thing till on Friday Mr. Haggard was going to Bungay to offer a reward for the perpetrator. Then only comes the story that the heavy blunt instrument which had struck the three fatal blows was—a railway train. You remember how in " Middle- march" the auctioneer sells a fender with a sharp edge on the representation that many a man has been left hanging because there was not a sharp-edged fender at hand for his wife to cut him down with.
I have the greatest doubts about that handy railway train, and I do not believe Mr. Rider Haggard saw any coagulated blood. Then, as to telepathy (the evidence for which has fallen away miserably since Mr. Gurney's time, and even he admitted it was inconclusive), my view would make a real coincidence, because the dog's voice, which is his audible wraith, would be heard at the very moment of death. Mr. Haggard insists upon the Saturday night train because that would enable a dog to communicate with him two hours after its head was " smashed to a pulp," or (by way of alternative) five hours before that was to happen to it. Nothing can deprive our brilliant novelist of the fact that he dreamed of the dog on the same night that the dbg died. But may the dog not have whined for ten minutes at the door of his sleeping master before setting off to meet that fatal cudgel on the bridge ?
—I write in the country, but cannot forget that I have been
A PUBLIC PROSECUTOR.
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